Classical Composer Reacts to On the Silent Wings of Freedom (Yes) | The Daily Doug (Episode 190) 

Onward is my favorite on the album, and the only song on the album I really love and come back to listen to occasionally.

I love that song!

Great song that my wife and I used for our first dance at our wedding. The album was out of print at the time, but the DJ insisted on finding their own copy.

Many good songs but Onward wow just special

A truly beautiful song, my wife and I picked this as our first song to dance to on our wedding day. Still together 27 years later!

My God, yes! 'Safe' should be one of your Friday long-format listens. You think Squire's bass work here is amazing? Try 'Safe'!

Lucky Seven!!

Almost not entirely off topic, but only recently I heard of something he did with Steve Hackett called Squacket. Spelling not guaranteed.

@@davep8221 Squackett, two t's! Not a bad album

In a similar vein the band "GTR" which was a Howe/Hackett collaboration..

Such a great song and adventure that is!

Better yet....check out the bass on tempus fugit from the drama album

Agreed Heart of the Sunrise is an exceptional and special piece

On some Yes tours the opening part of this tune was part of the Chris Squire/Alan White bass/drum solo. Fantastic stuff. Check out the DVD 'Yes Live at Montreux from 2003.

@@johnsatella1286 in tempus fugit its more impressive, but in Heart Of The Sunrise It marks the Melody allí the time, most impressive

That explains the topographic (get it?) maps on the inner sleeve!

The Yes Tor was noted on those maps on the sleeve.

LOL !!!!!

@@paulehney4581 "On a clear day, from the top, you can see faraway places with strange-sounding names."

Here's the kicker though... It wasn't Rick!

A Fantastic Song!!!

With Going for the One, which was a return from Rick wake man to the band since Tales…. They had simply inspiring reunion that gave them the Magic of producing one of the most emotional album They made it perfectly! They achieved’The One!’

I can't agree more. Turn of Century was with my wife and me when we kissed for the first time 43 years ago. The best song Yes ever produced!

Turn of the Century and Onward are two of the most beautiful Yes songs I’ve heard. Love both of them!

Every other song on that album is better

live from yessongs 1975, perfection

I second this... I've been waiting for Doug to do SK. He always notices Squire's bass lines... and that's an awesome one, and also one of my faves.

He alredy did

legendary gig

Good one. Pretty nice classical guitar on that too.

Onward might be the only song on the album I really like.

I'm with you on the two Focus ones.

Ditto Ditto Ditto. Have met, talked and breakfasted with Sir Thijs. A really great person and a critically acclaimed classical flautist. I was amazed he used a simple closed hole flute on the Focus tours I saw. Then again he was playing organ with the other hand most of the time.

You know that hit me too, how would you dance to it? like nobody's watching for sure.

Well, it was recorded in 1978, the peak of disco right there.

Disco Yes = The Red and Blue remix dance version of Owner of a Lonely Heart and the Hello Goodbye remix of Leave It.

Exactly. I'd like to see this guy react to Blink-182.

Exactly. I read an interview with him once which, of course I'll never be able to find, where he said he used certain words like notes or instruments - they just sounded cool. They sounded right. He didn't care about the meaning.

mike patton does that also

They tried with Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes but it did not went well in UK even though they did fairly well in the US tour. It was then when Asia happened after Yes split.

Indeed 'alienation', the pain and bane of the modern human being "the I", disconnected from yourself and others. The fall from grace as in the Garden of Eden exemplified by the consciousness soul overtaking the sentient soul in human development. From Anthroposophy "the Sun" the physical manifestation of the Christ Being offering the balance between Lucifer and Ahriman such that humanity can work from Free Will in their decision making processes. Esoteric knowledge now made open for those with ears and eyes.

Don't forget Nu somme du soliel (we are of the sun) from Topographic Oceans

Top 5 Yes definitely

That bass riff is one of may favorites from Chris.

I always thought it was Rick playing a Polymoog. Either way, it's a pretty cheesy and not very pleasant sound!

No. The weird synth is a Polymoog.

Don't blame him - and don't like the snyth tone at all - sounds like a 1980s kid's second-hand Casio!

They started with Eddie Offord but he quit in the middle of production. He used Dolby but the guys that came in after him didn't know he was using Dolby. All the overdubs were recorded without Dolby. They mixed it without Dolby because they didn't know the initial tracks had Dolby on them. That's why Tormato sounds so thin and trebly. Also Steve Howe was experimenting with new guitars and got something awful whiny tones. Squire was using his new Mu-tron and Wakeman was using his new Polymoog and Biotron. One of the only albums in history to have a Biotron on it. Tormato is generally considered to be the worst sounding Yes album.

@@frankmarsh1159 Thanks for the information. 👍

Rick didn't like the album Union, but loved the tour for it.

Frank Zappa, the Master, one of the pioneers of counter-culture in music and still so much more. The Adventures of Greggary Peccary, 20 minutes+, I'd like to see Doug react to that !

@@jacques-andresaint-laurent1300 i wonder what he would make of Peaches en Regalia. Its an awesome composition :)

Andy, definitely.

@@jacques-andresaint-laurent1300Zappa's Inca Roads as well.

Id like to see a breakdown of whatever it is that Zappa Plays Zappa did with Zombie Woof with Steve Vai. I would really love to have a better idea what on earth is going on there... If you havent, Id highly recommend listening to it, I think it is a very exquisite, tasteful and frankly masterful performance of an unsurprisingly solid composition (Zappa making a solid composition, Great Googly Moogly, still really like this song, but same applies to any mentioned already)

I can reproduce Chris's sound exactly. He uses as much treble as bass, new round-wound strings, a pick and on this particular record a flanger and wah-wah on the treble pick up.

Doug, sadly is a failed musician, failed piano teacher, so now he's trying to scrape a few bux together as a RU-vidr . . . He BARELY knows what he is talking about, and there's NO WAY this is his first listen / reaction ..

That photo of the group all wearing those ridiculous looking YES jackets just carrys the vibe for me - none of them looked happy about any of this. There are a couple of decent enough songs on the album, but I just felt let down by the thing as a whole. And we all know how things went from there...

Great spelling.

Thank you for being the only person here accurately describing the time and circumstances surrounding the making of this album. Most of the other comments here are complete b.s. from people who probably weren't even alive when YES made this record. People saying they broke up because of "partying" or because "New Wave was changing the music scene" or "Rick and Steve were competing to see who could play the fastest and the loudest." Such ridiculous claptrap made up out of thin air.

Yeah, Wakeman had some kind of endorsement deal with the Polymoog. Don't know whether that's the reason it's all over this album, but the fact that all the voices use the same oscillator and filter was a drawback.

A mellotron, or maybe that MIXED with a harpsichord??

He has already done a reaction video to a live version of machine messiah (my favorite from Drama).

Well, unless you count Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe...

Hey lay off Disco. Theres plenty of catchy great disco tracks. It's not the musicians fault that the genre was commercialized to hell and back and as a result overplayed EVERYWHERE..

@@Aquatarkus96 I stand by my post...and I was not talking to you!

@@roberttee9790 You're right, dude!

Also, Rick Wakeman (in his own words) "used to drink for the British Olympic team." Equally fitting description of Squire and White. Love 'em, but these guys basically partied their band out of existence around this time during the abortive Paris sessions.

Wakeman says in an interview that NASA could’ve saved money on space exploration by simply talking to Jon Anderson. 😂

It's not that hard... mainly and very briefly, it's spirituality. If you go down reading and researching you'll see his references are bright as day.. if you're not interested........

Another Rick quote paraphrased: Jon is the only person simultaneously trying to save the planet while living on another one

@@gokhanaya One needs to be well versed in Eastern and Gnostic revelations along with the Bible and the teachings of Zarathustra. Not all is revelation as some is word play, some love song lyrics, and some sound play. But according to esoteric traditions the creation of creation was through primal sounds that the languages we speak today are distant remembering. High the memory goes on past a mortal as me.

Toured with Yes also!

"The Great Spectacular" from 'Dregs of the Earth', or even "The Bash" from 'Night of the Living Dregs' would work, as well. However, "Odyssey" in particular is a favorite of mine. I had the great pleasure of discovering The Dregs early on, and even getting to hang them every time they came to South Florida. Allen Sloan and I made a round of nightclubs in the Atlanta area hearing some of his violin students playing in bands, and I had the great joy of playing T Lavitz's baby grand and Oberheim OB-Xa at his house. Andy West was always cool, and Rod Morgenstein was so full of joy while playing. Steve was, well, a genius. Great times.

I'd settle for Ice Cakes!

Great line of thinking!

I really enjoyed the 90215 album and tour; with Tony Kaye (Yes original keyboardist) on keyboards. It was a bit pop and polished but I enjoyed it.

I would love to hear Doug review "Endless Dream". "Talk", in my opinion, is one of the strongest Yes albums. Very much overlooked.

Homeworld would be a great choice New Languages is also awesome

@@danielmoonen1891 I always thought Talk, including Endless Dream, was ruined by Anderson. The Trevor Rabin bits were musically brilliant, daring, modern and cutting edge, but interweaved with "airy-fairy" (as I learned in this discussion) and poppish parts by Anderson, which sounded trivial and kitschy to me.

@@fogzax Yes, those are my favorites too!

@@danielmoonen1891 Indeed, it is a strong album.

Yes that IS amazing.

Complete nonsense. The music that YES did in the 80s wasn't "simple pop songs." Put the bong down.

That isn't quite accurate. The scene wasn't "changing to New Wave" in 1978. Mainstream rock and progressive rock were still kings with artists like Led Zeppelin, Kansas, Styx, Rush, Journey, the Eagles, Boston, Cheap Trick, the Doobie Brothers, Queen, Genesis, Van Halen, Bad Company, Pink Floyd, Springsteen, Heart, Supertramp, et al., dominating the radio airwaves and Billboard charts and arenas and stadiums. New Wave was an outgrowth of punk, which faded out around 1979 or 1980. About the only significantly popular bands, that would come to be known as New Wave, in 1978 were The Police, The Cars and the Talking Heads. And maybe Blondie (most people considered them a punk-pop hybrid). And there's a difference between popularity and intentional commerciality. "Owner of a Lonely Heart" is one of those anomaly songs that is progressive as heck but that just also happened to be melodic and catchy enough, at the right time, to become a big hit. But it wasn't any more popular than "Roundabout" was, and I never hear people saying "Roundabout" is "commercial." Same with "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Carry On Wayward Son" -- VERY progressive songs that also had coincidental crossover appeal. That doesn't make them "commercial" in a cynical or calculated or pejorative way (if that's what you were implying).

@@Ken5244 Umm, Carry On Wayward Son was 1976. And the year Tomato came out was the same year as the debut of Elvis Costello, The Cars, Devo, Blondie, Talking Heads and the Police. I'd call that the "new wave."

@@NelsonMontana1234 Yes, "Carry On Wayward Son" came out in 1976. So? I mentioned it my second paragraph as an example of a prog rock song that wasn't intentionally commercial but that became a pop hit anyway (in response to your insinuation that "Owner of a Lonely Heart" was intentionally commercial). The year that it came out is irrelevant. Your mention of the debuts of The Cars, Blondie, Talking Heads and The Police is a repeat of what I already said -- although you are incorrect re the timeline. You said that 1978 ("the year Tormato came out") saw the debuts of The Talking Heads and Blondie and Elvis Costello. That is incorrect. Blondie's debut album was released in 1976, and their second album came out in 1977. So they "debuted" two years before 1978, and they didn't become known to the masses until 1978's Parallel Lines album. The Talking Heads' first album came out in 1977, not 1978 (and it was largely ignored). Elvis Costello's first album (My Aim is True) also came out in 1977, not 1978. As for Devo, they didn't have a hit until 1980 with the Freedom of Choice album. The point I made -- and that I stand by -- is that your assertion that in 1978 "the music scene was changing to the new wave" is false. As I already stated, the only significantly popular bands in 1978, that would subsequently come to be known as New Wave, were the ones I listed. But only The Cars, Talking Heads, The Police and Blondie had hits on mainstream pop or AOR radio by 1978, and they weren't "changing the music scene." They were four groups, and the music scene was still completely dominated by the litany of artists I listed in my first posting above. You're exaggerating the importance of those four, and in no way did they have anything to do with the lesser success of YES's Tormato album. In 1978, no one was saying, "prog and hard rock are dead -- the New Wave is taking over."

@@Ken5244 Well, I wouldn't put Owner of the Lonely Heart in the same league as "Wayward Son" but, whatever. And Cheap Trick is more New Wave than hard rock or prog. You're also arguing against your own point by mentioning how some of those new wave albums actually came out a year earlier. The scene was changing! And I never said those bands completely dominated. Sure, there were still rock bands but which way did the industry go? Toward more prog or more new wave?

@@NelsonMontana1234 Cheap Trick isn't even remotely New Wave. They were/are a hard rock band influenced by Zeppelin and Hendrix and Cream and Aerosmith and The Beatles. No offense, but you sound/act like a guy in his 20s or 30s inaccurately describing a music scene that happened before he was born. I was there and lived it. The music scene wasn't changing to New Wave in any significant way in 1978, as only four of those previously mentioned bands had even had any hits, and except for The Cars, none had more than 1 hit by 1978. There was no stylistic change going on in 1978 that affected YES or any other rock bands in any way. You're simply a couple years too early in your analysis, that's all.

Not true at all. It's the Polymoog you're hearing. The Birotron is almost inaudible. Also Rick burned two Mellotrons that were no longer working. He spent half a million dollars trying to bring the Birotron to market. He would never burn them and wishes he still had one now.